Insurance companies are preparing for a new way of regulatory life in Washington, and they’re lobbying hard to make it as comfortable as possible.

Their message for policymakers: We are not American International Group.

The near failure and then taxpayer rescue of AIG during the 2008 financial crisis put big insurance companies on Washington’s radar, which resulted in the 2010 Dodd-Frank law requiring greater oversight of the industry. Now the industry is trying as much as possible to separate itself in the eyes of regulators and lawmakers from AIG and the risky activities that almost brought down the firm in order to blunt the impact of new rules.

It can be a tough sell.

“They’re afraid of being seen as too soft and letting another AIG happen in the future,” Kimberly Olson Dorgan, senior executive vice president of public policy for the American Council of Life Insurers, said of policymakers.

The industry, which has long been state-regulated, knows it is going to have to live with more oversight on the federal level and abroad.

So it has been busily working to make sure the new regulatory world for insurance is not a carbon copy of the regime that oversees banks.

To that end, insurance companies and trade groups are meeting with federal officials, getting sympathetic lawmakers to pressure regulators and working international meetings in an attempt to influence the new rules that are being finalized.

“It’s a combination of us spending more and reallocating,” said Leigh Ann Pusey, president of the American Insurance Association, which represents property-casualty insurers. “Part of it is just changing your focus, or expanding that focus.”

Much of the attention is on which insurers will be deemed important to the smooth running of the financial system and therefore subject to greater regulatory scrutiny.

In the United States, the Financial Stability Oversight Council will decide who gets the systemically important tag, something that could happen within weeks. With the tag come new rules and oversight by the Federal Reserve.

Insurers, including AIG and possibly Prudential and MetLife, will be the first set of firms outside the banking industry that FSOC deems as systemically important.

MetLife has aggressively opposed the designation in public, unlike Prudential, which has kept a lower profile, and AIG, which is resigned to the designation.

MetLife Chief Executive Officer Steven Kandarian has made trips to Washington this year to meet reporters and speak out at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce against the notion that traditional life insurance poses a risk to the financial system and economy.

He hits on a theme pushed by insurance lobbyists in Washington and abroad: Regulators should focus on nontraditional insurance activities, like AIG’s credit default swaps, rather than the basics of the business.

“AIG’s life insurance subsidiaries did not cause the company’s financial distress,” Kandarian said in a speech at the Chamber last week. “They were victims of it.”

Prudential continues to argue that it does not meet the criteria for a systemic designation and has had executives including its CEO meet with regulators for several months to talk about the company, a Prudential spokesman said.

“Our aim has been to be helpful and cooperative in an effort to achieve a regulatory outcome that makes sense for our industry and the millions of clients who rely on our products and services,” he said.

AIG declined to comment.

Advocates of financial reform, however, are warning against going too soft on insurance companies even if they aren’t engaging in the type of activities that nearly sank AIG.

“AIG isn’t AIG anymore. That was the crisis in 2008. But there’s a lot of lessons from AIG that are applicable,” said Americans for Financial Reform policy director Marcus Stanley. “People trust insurance companies to provide them with guarantees on financial products. It’s a business the insurance companies are still in.”

MetLife had a taste of what it’s like to be regulated by the Fed when it owned a bank holding company and it was a bitter experience. In 2011, the Fed rejected the company’s plan to boost dividend payments to shareholders. MetLife has since sold its banking operations to GE Capital to get out from under Fed regulation.

Other life insurers have opted to hold on to their banking activities and under the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law will have to keep dealing with the Fed regardless of whether they are deemed systemically important.

Top insurers are making sure they are getting face time with the central bank.

In the past month, MetLife and Prudential have met with Fed officials to talk about the systemic designations and the kinds of capital that insurers may be required to hold.

MetLife’s April 2 meeting included New York Federal Reserve Bank President William Dudley and MetLife’s chief financial officer, John Hele.

The industry’s push to make sure its companies are not treated like banks has been embraced by many members of Congress, who are urging regulators to proceed with caution, including Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) and the panel’s top Republican, Mike Crapo of Idaho.

Some lawmakers who have shown little sympathy to Wall Street banks’ concerns with new rules have also urged regulators to take a lighter touch with insurance firms.

“Applying a bank-centric capital system to insurance-based holding companies raises significant concerns,” 24 senators, including Democrats Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Dick Durbin of Illinois, wrote regulators in October.

The industry also has concerns abroad.

An international panel of regulators at the Financial Stability Board, in tandem with the International Association of Insurance Supervisors, is preparing to designate firms that are systemically important on a global scale, which will also come with new rules.

“Peripheral attention” was once paid to global regulatory developments, but that’s changing, said David Snyder, vice president of international policy for the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America.

Prudential, which operates around the world, is hiring an internationally focused government affairs vice president in Washington “to monitor the political and regulatory landscape for threats and opportunities” as “government and institutional relations has become increasingly important.” The person will work on international trade issues.

In October, the industry formed its first formal international association, called the Global Federation of Insurance Associations, to respond more effectively to international regulatory developments.

The life insurance association ACLI has eight to 10 people on staff who work on international issues, traveling “extensively” to keep up with meetings that IAIS is holding, Dorgan said.

The new international aspect of insurance regulation isn’t lost on Congress, either.

House Financial Services insurance subcommittee chairman Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas) raised the international issues last month with the Federal Insurance Office, another new Washington focal point for the industry that did not exist before AIG’s blowup.

Neugebauer asked for a meeting with the office’s director, Michael McRaith, and urged him to not support a “rush to judgment” in the IAIS process and to reject recommendations out of line with U.S. regulation.

“The U.S. insurance industry and state insurance regulators performed very well during the financial crisis and its aftermath, despite near-record market declines and catastrophic losses around the globe,” Neugebauer said.